Analog and digital? That’s just a small slice of the pie. The post-digital / post-analog world uses those two ingredients but adds others, like biological, photochemical, optical, and perhaps most importantly, kinetic.
Instead of electrifying screens and circuits, then, you can also make stuff move.
Mouse on Mars, in collaboration with the Sonic Robots project of Moritz Simon Geist, are making just such a collective – human meets robot. And it makes some sense not just in technological terms, but aesthetic ones. The German collaborative get as playful with robotic use of objects and percussion as they do in their own devilish experimental improvisations.
Here they are testing out those machines:
Our friend Oli, creator of Elastic Drums, also visiting the studio to see how apps and robots can coincide. That makes use of the drum machine app itself (as sequencer and sound source), plus percussion triggers in the physical world via IK Multimedia’s iRig Midi interface and the Sonic Robots actuators.
They’ve also been jamming away at Superbooth:
Those are the jams/experiments, but these are leading to finished musical output, too, like this track/video:
For his part, Moritz has continued making sculptures and installations, alongside his deep research investigations of the topic. For instance:
As I’ve said before, I love that this stuff is getting democratized. Getting everyone drum machines launched entire club cultures and countless genres. So why not make kinetic action something we all get involved in, too? We’ll be looking more at that as we talk further to Johannes Lohbihler and dig into the Dada Machines project: